So I enjoyed The Journey Down, SkyGoblin’s remake of their classic-style point and click adventure. But I was so hesitant about the price. Charging £10 for a game that lasted a couple of hours seemed problematic. But worse, this is the first chapter of an unknown number, meaning it’s impossible to know just how much you’d be investing to see the series through. Rather brilliantly, the developers have just announced they’re halving the price, bringing it to $7/£5, which is exactly where I think it should be. There’s a fun video explaining this below.

If you already bought the game at full price, you’ll receive the game’s jazzy soundtrack for free. If you didn’t, you can get the game for a fiver via Desura now. (Weirdly, it’s still a tenner at GamersGate, but I’ve a funny feeling that by my pointing this out it might change soon.)

If there’s one thing I learned from TellTale, it’s not to buy an episodic point-n-click adventure until it’s completed. To be fair, I *should* have learned that lesson from AGON, which still isn’t completed and probably never will be. But even the more successful games from TT show a bit of slack as they progress. Plus, the final price for the set is usually a lot closer to what I want to spend.

The Journey Down looks like a good game, but I’ll be waiting until they drop the price further, or the entire set comes out.

Looks like a more enjoyable way to spend time then watching the shit that Hollywood regurgitates (I just watched Wrath of the Titans to kill some time today – holy fuck was that awful). It’s at a pretty great price point for what it is. If I was working I would have snapped this up for its original price in a heartbeat.

“Charging £10 for a game that lasted a couple of hours seemed problematic”

How much do you pay for music albums that barely last an hour?

In before illiterate comparisons between the mediums and “replay value”. I can only say that my questions serves right anyone who judges a game’s commercial worth based on the amount of play hours. Were they some of the better or best hours of your life? Have you ever bought an album that you thought wasn’t worth the money?

Insisting that a developer.publisher sells a game at a certain price goes too far, and clamoring for lower prices only considering your own wallet (especially since these are luxury goods) certainly seems the wrong way to go about things.

But certainly every person can and should decide for him/herself what a fair price is for a product. And some developers/publishers set prices fairly high.. some set them fairly low. Following them blindly seems like a strange decision. Especially if there are a lot of people who feel the same way and the product is from a developer/publisher who could use the additional money (from additional sales).

I agree in theory, but The Journey Down isn’t going to be a few of the greatest hours of your life. It’s a solid, competent, gorgeous-looking point and click game. But there’s nothing new, special or innovative about it.

If you’re going to be a fairly standard, derivative game, you need to price accordingly. It’s great, but Resonance is at least AS good, and that’s 2-3 times as long and was originally 2/3rds of the price.